“Oh my lord man—not _you_ my lord Media!—high and mighty Puissance! great King of Creation!—thou art but the biggest of braggarts! In every age, thou boastest of thy valorous advances:—flat fools, old dotards, and numskulls, our sires! All the Past, wasted time! the Present knows all! right lucky, fellow-beings, we live now! every man an author! books plenty as men! strike a light in a minute! teeth sold by the pound! all the elements fetching and carrying! lightning running on errands! rivers made to order! the ocean a puddle!— But ages back they boasted like us; and ages to come, forever and ever, they’ll boast. Ages back they black-balled the past, thought the last day was come; so wise they were grown. Mardi could not stand long; have to annex one of the planets; invade the great sun; colonize the moon;—conquerors sighed for new Mardis; and sages for heaven— having by heart all the primers here below. Like us, ages back they groaned under their books; made bonfires of libraries, leaving ashes behind, mid which we reverentially grope for charred pages, forgetting we are so much wiser than they.—But amazing times! astounding revelations; preternatural divulgings!—How now?—more wonderful than all our discoveries is this: that they never were discovered before. So simple, no doubt our ancestors overlooked them; intent on deeper things—the deep things of the soul. All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering. We are children, climbing trees after birds’ nests, and making a great shout, whether we find eggs in them or no. But where are our wings, which our fore-fathers surely had not? Tell us, ye sages! something worth an archangel’s learning; discover, ye discoverers, something new. Fools, fools! Mardi’s not changed: the sun yet rises in its old place in the East; all things go on in the same old way; we cut our eye-teeth just as late as they did, three thousand years ago.” “Your pardon,” said Mohi, “for beshrew me, they are not yet all cut. At threescore and ten, here have I a new tooth coming now.”